What is left from freelance income in Portugal once income tax and social contributions are paid.
Left after tax and contributions
€30,560 per year
About €2,547 a month
Effective tax rate 38.9%
51% you keep€29,440 to taxes and contributions
Assumptions
Based ondeductible business expenses: €10,000, what you do: Professional services (activities on the art. 151.º CIRS list), how you are taxed: Regime simplificado (category B), national rules, no region selected
✓ 2026 rates confirmed against two independent sources: the official tax
administration and PwC. Nothing here rests on one.
Last verified 2026-07-14.How we verify
Where the money goes
Business income
€50,000
Revenue €60,000 less expenses €10,000, paid out of your pocket, but they do not reduce the taxable base in this regime
Segurança Social: trabalhador independente
-€8,988
21.40% of €42,000, 70% of revenue
Income tax
-€10,452
Taxable base €42,012: revenue €60,000 × 0.75 deemed-income coefficient, less the €2,988 of contributions above €6,000 (10% of revenue). Actual expenses do not enter it.
Each regime below is checked against the amounts and activity you entered in the form.
The conditions the calculator cannot see, like how long you have been in the country
and what you did before, you confirm yourself. Every condition is listed in full: this
is the page the comparison cards link to instead of quoting the law on a card.
Regime simplificado (category B) : The default for most freelancers: taxable income is a set share of turnover, actual expenses are not asked for; open up to EUR 200,000 of annual turnover.
Ticking a box is your own confirmation, not advice. The conditions come from the same
verified sources as the rates.
Portugal taxes your turnover, not your profit
The regime simplificado does not look at what you spent. It takes what you invoiced, multiplies it by a coefficient fixed by your activity, and sends that figure to the income tax scale. Your laptop, your rent, your accountant and your flights do not appear anywhere in the calculation, because the coefficient already decided, on your behalf, what your costs are.
That coefficient is the whole game. A listed professional activity keeps 75% of turnover in the tax base. A service that is not on the list keeps 35%. Selling goods, or running a restaurant or a hotel, keeps 15%. Services rendered to a company you control keep 100%: the base is your turnover, with no deemed cost at all.
Same invoice, wildly different tax, decided by the activity code you chose when you registered.
What survives the coefficient is then aggregated and taxed on the ordinary IRS scale, from 12.5% to 48%, exactly as if it were a salary, the same scale the Portuguese income tax calculator is built around, and the place to read how it works.
Social security uses a different coefficient on the same invoice
Segurança Social does not reuse the tax coefficient. It applies its own to the same turnover: 70% for service income of any kind, listed or not, and 20% for the production and sale of goods. The contribution rate of 21.4% lands on that base, which stops growing past an annual ceiling of €77,347.
So one invoice produces two different bases. A freelance developer is taxed on one share of revenue and pays contributions on another, and neither number is the profit they actually made.
Contributions barely dent your tax base, and for some activities not at all
Contributions are not simply deductible. They reduce the coefficient-based income only in the part that exceeds 10% of your gross income, and the law grants that only to the two service coefficients, the listed professions and the unlisted services.
Everyone else gets nothing. For goods and hospitality the contributions land well under that threshold anyway, so there is nothing above it to deduct. For services billed to your own company the threshold is beside the point: the norm does not extend the relief to that coefficient at all.
We got this wrong once. The rule sat in our engine as a single threshold applied to every activity, and the calculator quietly handed the deduction to people the law excludes, understating the tax on invoices to your own company by thousands of euros a year. Independent verification caught it before publication. It is fixed, and the fix is why the activity you select above changes more than one line of the result.
IVA and organised accounting sit outside this calculator
VAT. IVA is not modelled here. It is not income tax, and mostly passes through you rather than out of you, but it governs your invoices and your quarterly cash flow.
Organised accounting. You can elect contabilidade organizada instead, and above €200,000 of prior-year income you must. It taxes your real result: real expenses come off, contributions come off in full, and the ten per cent rule disappears. It also obliges you to pay a certified accountant. We model the simplified regime only.
Thinking about a company instead? The Portuguese founder route runs the same invoices through corporate tax and dividends. And if the country itself is still open: the Spanish autónomo works on the opposite principle: there you deduct what you actually spent, and the social security bill lands every month whether or not a client paid you.
Questions people actually ask
Can I deduct my laptop, my coworking desk and my accountant in the simplified regime?
No. Not one euro of them. The simplified regime does not ask what you spent, because your spending has no place in the formula: it takes your turnover, multiplies it by the coefficient of your activity, and taxes the result. The allowance for costs is already baked into that coefficient, whether you actually spent that much, spent nothing, or spent twice as much. Freelancers coming from a country where you keep receipts to lower the bill spend their first year keeping receipts that do nothing.
Which coefficient applies to a software developer invoicing foreign clients?
The high one, if the activity you registered is among the professions listed in the table annexed to the income tax code: engineers, doctors, lawyers, designers, IT professionals and the rest. Listed professions carry the high coefficient, which means a large share of turnover is taxable. Services that are not on that list carry a much lower one. What settles it is the activity code you pick when you register with the tax office, and that code settles most of your tax bill, so it deserves more thought than it usually gets.
Does invoicing my own company change the tax?
Sharply, and always against you. Services billed to a company you control, or one under the fiscal transparency regime where you are a partner, are taxed on the full turnover: the coefficient leaves nothing behind as deemed cost. Those invoices also fall outside the rule that lets contributions reduce the base, so the relief that a normal service provider gets does not reach them. The norm is aimed exactly at people who invoice their own structure, and the calculator above applies it only when you pick that activity.
Do I pay social security in a month with no invoices?
Yes, but not as much as an autónomo in Spain. Your contribution base is recomputed each quarter from the income you actually declared, so a dead quarter lowers the bill instead of leaving it untouched. Below a certain level of income the law fixes a minimum monthly contribution, so the bill never reaches zero. New freelancers get a longer grace period: contributions are not due at all for the first twelve months of activity.
Should I switch to organised accounting?
Only if your real, documented costs are clearly bigger than the deemed allowance your coefficient already grants you. And for someone selling their own time, they usually are not. Organised accounting taxes your actual result, so real expenses and contributions come off in full, but it obliges you to retain a certified accountant, and above the turnover threshold it stops being a choice. The calculator above models the simplified regime.
Your result can move: personal deductions, family status and special regimes we do not model can make your real tax lower in 2 cases, and higher in 1 case.
Important limitations4
Every rule below is real and is left out on purpose. Modelling it would need
information this form does not ask you for, or a mechanism we have not built yet.
What matters is not that something is missing, but which way it moves your number,
so that is what we tell you.
Your real tax may be LOWER: In the first two years of activity the deemed-cost coefficients for services are cut (by half in the opening year, by a quarter in the next), and social security contributions are not due at all for the first twelve months. Neither relief is applied here. Applies to: Anyone who has just registered as self-employed, which is most people arriving in Portugal.
Your real tax may be HIGHER: Part of the deemed expense allowance has to be backed by real, documented expenses: if you cannot show them, the taxable base is increased. We do not model that add-back, so a freelancer with few real expenses is shown a lower tax than the law would charge. Applies to: Freelancers on the simplified regime with few documented expenses or contributions.
May not apply to you: Contributions are really assessed quarterly on the previous quarter's income, and you may adjust the assessed base up or down by up to 25%. We compute an annual figure from the income you enter, so your monthly bills will not match this line exactly even when the yearly total is close. Applies to: Everyone paying social security as a self-employed worker.
Your real tax may be LOWER: Tax credits for health, education, rent and general family expenses are not modelled (see the income tax calculator for the same limitation). The tax shown is before them. Applies to: Residents who file receipts, which is nearly everyone.
This calculator is for information only and is not tax advice. Rates and thresholds
change; check the methodology page for sources and
verification dates, and confirm your own situation with a qualified adviser.